Should Pixar be out "performing" the movies that it takes hundreds of people years to make, just so they don't have to fret about someone in Russia making advertising money off of setting up pirated downloads?
Your analogy is confusing.
11A. Above-the-line filmmakers (director, writer, actors) make their real money from box office attendance, not from DVDs. DVD piracy and digital downloads have a miniscule effect on theater attendance, since people buying movie tickets are mainly buying an excuse to get AWAY from their computers for a few hours:P.
11B. The hundreds of people that work on movies make their money from their weekly salary, and never see a penny more if the movie is popular. These people are paid regardless if the film is a work of art or paint-by-numbers dreck.
Simpsons, Family Guy and even South Park may be full of dirty jokes, but their "moral of the story" is almost always in favour of the conversative American Way, often injecting principles in such a straightforward manner as could only be applied to stereotypical idealised lives.
That's not necessarily so; though they often have such a moral, the character giving voice is usually compromised at the end of the episode and made to appear unreliable.
The real problem with this quasi-subversive dreck is that it tears everything you consider sane apart by the end of the episode, subverting not just government and morality, but the idea of that people can be governed, can be loved, and can embody right action. The real losers at the end of a Family Guy or Simpsons episode are the characters that try to adjust this status quo. The message to the viewer is: The world is unjust and insane, and the worst thing you could possibly do is try to fix it.
I knew a strong Insightful or Informative was iffy, but if I ended on a good zinger, I could land a Funny. And just about everything people post on slashdot could end with some sort of "I have no SO" joke. QED
Oh I see it, my fault. And indeed, their entertainment unit loses money, and their "client" and "information worker" income (read Windows XP and Office) are double their "Server" income.
That chart's a revenue breakdown by sector, not profit breakdown by sector, which what he probably means by "makes all their money." There's no way their entertainment arm is making that much money, particularly when they state openly that Zune and Xbox are losing money.
my understanding is that the main principle behind transporter operation is the idea that matter-energy conversion is possible (and practical). Same goes for holodecks and replicators
I own many of the technical manuals, and they go to pains to handwave over this part of it, making a big deal about "Heisenberg compensators" and working through how these machines capture the data (basically every quantum number in the system, in real time, digitally). All of the gear you mention usually has something called a "phase transition coil" that does the complicated job of making the matter non-corporeal. One can assume the mass is turned into energy, the books won't dissuade you from this, but mass into energy isn't a phase transition, and the amount of energy you'd get from the average human mass would destroy the Enterprise several times over.
The likely explanation a writer, cornered, would give you is that these devices handle matter that is in an as-yet-undiscovered, highly exotic, highly energetic, wavelike, and protean phase of matter, that might as well be energy from our modern-day perspective. In the canon, an object being transported is never referred to as energy, but as "phased matter," which would seem to support this.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going off to sleep with my highly exotic, highly energetic, and as-yet-undiscovered girlfriend.
In my context, "high-definition" is mostly a marketing term, so that people who procure our gear and only know about video are enticed to buy "high-definition" audio equipment as well. OTOH, we usually apply the term "high-definition" to audio recordings that exceed 48 kHz sampling rate or 24 bit sample size. Many sound effects (and much film music nowadays) is originated at 96 kHz or 192 kHz so that we have more bandwidth to play with when we do pitch shifting, and in anticipation of the 96 kHz presentation formats (if and when they are ever introduced.) We don't do any audio professionally at 32 bit, unfortunately, but wider sample sizes allow much more dynamic work with recordings (basically, it can make mixes louder, and quiet mixes sound better).
On the business possibilities, businessweek online has an interview with BillG about this very issue. I won't spoil the ending, but MS speculates it could be selling in the "low billions of dollars" in the things in a few years, though they only seem to know how to make it an information kiosk. At best it would be a "complimentary" computer to your office machine and, presumably, the computer hanging on your wall that sells you movies. There's your ecosystem.
It might bear mentioning, of course, that the iPhone is also a complimentary computing device, so we all seem to be rowing in the same direction.
I agree the implementation's all there, but what's the business angle on it? A $10,000 rig that lets you share photos and surf the web is sort of retarded, even in places like hotels an casinos; it might have a use for sales and presentations, that sort of thing, but its useless for productivity, and the stated partners already have cheaper ways of doing what this thing does (slot machine, anyone? wifi in peoples rooms?). The iPhone may be a 'gimmick', but it uses the technology in a way that probably adds value to a smartphone, and very few at this point doubt Apple will be printing money selling the thing.
The smart guy is going to be the one who figures out how to put this on people's desks for $1000, or in their backpacks for $2000. This Microsoft product appears to have superb implementation of stuff people only do casually. One hint as to how MS might make money off it is from the video in TFA where the guy from Research uses that goddamn word - "ecosystem" - to describe how different devices interact with the table. Meaning there'll probably be a Microsoft CoffeeTableForSure or whatever version of bluetooth that the table requires.
OTOH, MS Research has a nasty habit of coming up with cool stuff that no one ever gets a chance to buy.
A fascinating book on the subject, talking a little about the tech, but also making the point the eventually, the tech will enable you to acquire physical objects that are essentially "open source," or rather, "open design", and all you would need to buy in the future in order to have an endless stream of consumer products is a vat of plastic.
If you wanted to have a car, you probably couldn't print that out at home, you'd have to go to the 3D Kinkos. Imagine if you could just download a car off the internet, customize it for yourself (with ample help from enthusiasts, like Linux today), and print it out.
There are two kinds of workplace analysts- segmentors and integrators:
Segmentors break workforces down into segmentors and integrators.
Integrators recognize that such distinctions only serve to generalize what is in fact a matter that an individual should resolve with his supervisor, and that identifying individuals as one or the other (or even at a point on a continuum) doesn't provide useful data in isolation.
Pro Tools won't play audio off of a drive it does not "bless". On a Mac, it ill only bless HFS or HFS+ drives mounted locally. On the PC, it will only bless FAT32 or NTFS drives mounted locally; I believe the main issue is that Pro Tools requires a relatively low guaranteed latency. Pro Tools is very weird about this, it won't even play off of locally-mounted software RAIDs. Certain SAN solutions work, but they are unsupported by Digidesign, are flaky, and really far too expensive for what you get -- having a tape backup is better. Pro Tools has absolutely zero mechanism for collaboration on sessions (unlike Nuendo, which BTW supports NAS and just about any playback volume), and the one or two times I've seen a SAN working it just seemed to make more of a mess than having people work independently.
I would also add that sound editing has about a fifth the budget of picture editing in the feature world, and one stumbling block is cost, which is unfortunate. But the fact that PT really doesn't play nice with SAN is the primary limiting factor.
Yeah, the real issue is that Pro Tools won't talk to a SAN in any reliable way, which is really a miserable state of affairs. Avid's are much better about it.
I still don't see your point, though. Avid ships G5s with their turnkey setups, and the HPs they ship with their PC solutions are pretty comparable to a good G5. The dubbing stage I deliver to uses G5 for all of their playback. Spider-Man 3 is being dubbed off of Macintoshes. Every Oscar winner for best sound editing over the past decade has used a Macintosh. That is pro class enough for me.
So did you tell your bosses that their work is dependent upon your consumer class computer under your desk?
Sigh deeper. Digidesign Pro Tools on the PC has a lot of issues, and no one uses it. Pro Tools can't use a SAN or NAS for storage. The LTO in the other room has my backups. If my drives die it's all my responsibility, but I have mirrors of most of my critical stuff. The motherboard or PSU dying is the big issue, and I can always swap out my HDD when that happens.
I am unaware of a $3,000 "consumer-class" computer with 4 CPUS and 3 PCI Express slots.
So even if I could justify the cost of keeping a spare G5, it would do me no good as I cant get the HDD out of the broken one as I am not "permitted" to open the case without voiding the warranty
I haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about. HDD, RAM, Wifi, and optical drive hardware installation instructions were provided in the box, in a paper book, with every Mac I've bought in the last 5 years (where applicable), and you are welcome to do them yourself if you have the aptitude.
The Apple site will happily inform you on how to replace the RAM on your iMac. You can also find a complete summary of user-serviceable parts/options for a G5 here.
Lastly, people complain that Javascript isn't Object Oriented. To which I can only act annoyed. What is this?
That's a first-class function or closure, not a class. You still can't do class or private and protected methods using this hack, nor can you do any meaningful inheritance or mixins.
You're right, Javascript is a good language with an unfortunate reputation, but it ain't object oriented. Its functional, and thus frameworks are built with first-class function and closures.
Now, if you have some fancy design business, where deadlines are measured in weeks or months, as opposed to minutes as they are in retail, then sure, you can probably afford to ship off a box and wait for a few weeks until it gets fixed.
Sigh. My G5 under my desk has all of the sound effects for a certain arachnid-Stan Lee-related movie on it. If it dies and it can't get fixed, my dubbing stage will stop working within about an hour or two, and the dubbing stage is booked for around $1000/hour. "Fancy Design businesses" like advertising, commercial art and film production, have hideously short turnarounds and are ruinously expensive on a minutes and hours basis.
AppleCare ain't great, good for home, but bad for what I do professionally. So how do we do it? Our tech support people take Macs seriously, they have a small inventory of spares for when they need to send one back, and they know enough to fix small things themselves. I've never needed mine replaced for anything, FWIW. Any large organization could handle supporting Macs, having IT people who take them seriously and keep up to date on their issues is the real problem.
Oh and having a spare machines on site helps too;)
Google is a private company and is fully allowed to customize its survice as it sees fit.
Well yeah, and Microsoft bundles WMP and makes Internet Explorer unremovable, and various state, federal and foreign governments enjoin and penalize it for that. It's a no-no to use your monopoly power to give yourself an uncompetitive advantage in another business. This can be seen as Google becoming a victim of its own success. If it's ubiquitous and a one-stop-search shop, it becomes a kind of gatekeeper to the deep Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Your analogy is confusing.
11A. Above-the-line filmmakers (director, writer, actors) make their real money from box office attendance, not from DVDs. DVD piracy and digital downloads have a miniscule effect on theater attendance, since people buying movie tickets are mainly buying an excuse to get AWAY from their computers for a few hours :P.
11B. The hundreds of people that work on movies make their money from their weekly salary, and never see a penny more if the movie is popular. These people are paid regardless if the film is a work of art or paint-by-numbers dreck.
That's not necessarily so; though they often have such a moral, the character giving voice is usually compromised at the end of the episode and made to appear unreliable.
The real problem with this quasi-subversive dreck is that it tears everything you consider sane apart by the end of the episode, subverting not just government and morality, but the idea of that people can be governed, can be loved, and can embody right action. The real losers at the end of a Family Guy or Simpsons episode are the characters that try to adjust this status quo. The message to the viewer is: The world is unjust and insane, and the worst thing you could possibly do is try to fix it.
I knew a strong Insightful or Informative was iffy, but if I ended on a good zinger, I could land a Funny. And just about everything people post on slashdot could end with some sort of "I have no SO" joke. QED
Oh I see it, my fault. And indeed, their entertainment unit loses money, and their "client" and "information worker" income (read Windows XP and Office) are double their "Server" income.
That chart's a revenue breakdown by sector, not profit breakdown by sector, which what he probably means by "makes all their money." There's no way their entertainment arm is making that much money, particularly when they state openly that Zune and Xbox are losing money.
I own many of the technical manuals, and they go to pains to handwave over this part of it, making a big deal about "Heisenberg compensators" and working through how these machines capture the data (basically every quantum number in the system, in real time, digitally). All of the gear you mention usually has something called a "phase transition coil" that does the complicated job of making the matter non-corporeal. One can assume the mass is turned into energy, the books won't dissuade you from this, but mass into energy isn't a phase transition, and the amount of energy you'd get from the average human mass would destroy the Enterprise several times over.
The likely explanation a writer, cornered, would give you is that these devices handle matter that is in an as-yet-undiscovered, highly exotic, highly energetic, wavelike, and protean phase of matter, that might as well be energy from our modern-day perspective. In the canon, an object being transported is never referred to as energy, but as "phased matter," which would seem to support this.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going off to sleep with my highly exotic, highly energetic, and as-yet-undiscovered girlfriend.
Hello, I am a Sound Designer for motion pictures.
In my context, "high-definition" is mostly a marketing term, so that people who procure our gear and only know about video are enticed to buy "high-definition" audio equipment as well. OTOH, we usually apply the term "high-definition" to audio recordings that exceed 48 kHz sampling rate or 24 bit sample size. Many sound effects (and much film music nowadays) is originated at 96 kHz or 192 kHz so that we have more bandwidth to play with when we do pitch shifting, and in anticipation of the 96 kHz presentation formats (if and when they are ever introduced.) We don't do any audio professionally at 32 bit, unfortunately, but wider sample sizes allow much more dynamic work with recordings (basically, it can make mixes louder, and quiet mixes sound better).
If they were in English would it really make a difference ;).
On the business possibilities, businessweek online has an interview with BillG about this very issue. I won't spoil the ending, but MS speculates it could be selling in the "low billions of dollars" in the things in a few years, though they only seem to know how to make it an information kiosk. At best it would be a "complimentary" computer to your office machine and, presumably, the computer hanging on your wall that sells you movies. There's your ecosystem.
It might bear mentioning, of course, that the iPhone is also a complimentary computing device, so we all seem to be rowing in the same direction.
I agree the implementation's all there, but what's the business angle on it? A $10,000 rig that lets you share photos and surf the web is sort of retarded, even in places like hotels an casinos; it might have a use for sales and presentations, that sort of thing, but its useless for productivity, and the stated partners already have cheaper ways of doing what this thing does (slot machine, anyone? wifi in peoples rooms?). The iPhone may be a 'gimmick', but it uses the technology in a way that probably adds value to a smartphone, and very few at this point doubt Apple will be printing money selling the thing.
The smart guy is going to be the one who figures out how to put this on people's desks for $1000, or in their backpacks for $2000. This Microsoft product appears to have superb implementation of stuff people only do casually. One hint as to how MS might make money off it is from the video in TFA where the guy from Research uses that goddamn word - "ecosystem" - to describe how different devices interact with the table. Meaning there'll probably be a Microsoft CoffeeTableForSure or whatever version of bluetooth that the table requires.
OTOH, MS Research has a nasty habit of coming up with cool stuff that no one ever gets a chance to buy.
Though I'm sure some jackoff would have been spending the whole decade claiming that 640 kilobeats was enough for anybody.
Seriously, we're here all week.
+--------+ +------+
|Antenna |->| OS X |
+--------+ +------+
||
\/
+-------+
|Speaker|
+-------+
There ya go.
Hello, Mr. Potato Head! Back doors are not secrets!
A fascinating book on the subject, talking a little about the tech, but also making the point the eventually, the tech will enable you to acquire physical objects that are essentially "open source," or rather, "open design", and all you would need to buy in the future in order to have an endless stream of consumer products is a vat of plastic.
If you wanted to have a car, you probably couldn't print that out at home, you'd have to go to the 3D Kinkos. Imagine if you could just download a car off the internet, customize it for yourself (with ample help from enthusiasts, like Linux today), and print it out.
"Hello, Dave Shutton, Springfield Shopper. Who are you, and what are you doing here?"
There are two kinds of workplace analysts- segmentors and integrators:
Pro Tools won't play audio off of a drive it does not "bless". On a Mac, it ill only bless HFS or HFS+ drives mounted locally. On the PC, it will only bless FAT32 or NTFS drives mounted locally; I believe the main issue is that Pro Tools requires a relatively low guaranteed latency. Pro Tools is very weird about this, it won't even play off of locally-mounted software RAIDs. Certain SAN solutions work, but they are unsupported by Digidesign, are flaky, and really far too expensive for what you get -- having a tape backup is better. Pro Tools has absolutely zero mechanism for collaboration on sessions (unlike Nuendo, which BTW supports NAS and just about any playback volume), and the one or two times I've seen a SAN working it just seemed to make more of a mess than having people work independently.
I would also add that sound editing has about a fifth the budget of picture editing in the feature world, and one stumbling block is cost, which is unfortunate. But the fact that PT really doesn't play nice with SAN is the primary limiting factor.
Yeah, the real issue is that Pro Tools won't talk to a SAN in any reliable way, which is really a miserable state of affairs. Avid's are much better about it.
I still don't see your point, though. Avid ships G5s with their turnkey setups, and the HPs they ship with their PC solutions are pretty comparable to a good G5. The dubbing stage I deliver to uses G5 for all of their playback. Spider-Man 3 is being dubbed off of Macintoshes. Every Oscar winner for best sound editing over the past decade has used a Macintosh. That is pro class enough for me.
Sigh deeper. Digidesign Pro Tools on the PC has a lot of issues, and no one uses it. Pro Tools can't use a SAN or NAS for storage. The LTO in the other room has my backups. If my drives die it's all my responsibility, but I have mirrors of most of my critical stuff. The motherboard or PSU dying is the big issue, and I can always swap out my HDD when that happens.
I am unaware of a $3,000 "consumer-class" computer with 4 CPUS and 3 PCI Express slots.
I haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about. HDD, RAM, Wifi, and optical drive hardware installation instructions were provided in the box, in a paper book, with every Mac I've bought in the last 5 years (where applicable), and you are welcome to do them yourself if you have the aptitude.
The Apple site will happily inform you on how to replace the RAM on your iMac. You can also find a complete summary of user-serviceable parts/options for a G5 here.
Please post a link to this warranty you read.
Thanks for the link, that's interesting.
That's a first-class function or closure, not a class. You still can't do class or private and protected methods using this hack, nor can you do any meaningful inheritance or mixins.
You're right, Javascript is a good language with an unfortunate reputation, but it ain't object oriented. Its functional, and thus frameworks are built with first-class function and closures.
Sigh. My G5 under my desk has all of the sound effects for a certain arachnid-Stan Lee-related movie on it. If it dies and it can't get fixed, my dubbing stage will stop working within about an hour or two, and the dubbing stage is booked for around $1000/hour. "Fancy Design businesses" like advertising, commercial art and film production, have hideously short turnarounds and are ruinously expensive on a minutes and hours basis.
AppleCare ain't great, good for home, but bad for what I do professionally. So how do we do it? Our tech support people take Macs seriously, they have a small inventory of spares for when they need to send one back, and they know enough to fix small things themselves. I've never needed mine replaced for anything, FWIW. Any large organization could handle supporting Macs, having IT people who take them seriously and keep up to date on their issues is the real problem.
Oh and having a spare machines on site helps too ;)
Well yeah, and Microsoft bundles WMP and makes Internet Explorer unremovable, and various state, federal and foreign governments enjoin and penalize it for that. It's a no-no to use your monopoly power to give yourself an uncompetitive advantage in another business. This can be seen as Google becoming a victim of its own success. If it's ubiquitous and a one-stop-search shop, it becomes a kind of gatekeeper to the deep Internet.
That comes dangerously close to Google abusing its search monopoly.
You mean mystupidsitcom.abc.disney.go.com. They paid a lot of money for the "go.com" TLD, and damn it they're gonna use it!